Another Free Operating System: NewOS

JigSaw writes: "Is the world ready for yet another Operating System? Travis Geiselbrecht, an ex-BeOS kernel engineer, seems to think so. (He is actually the one who wrote the Linux ext2 filesystem add-on for BeOS). He recently put up on his web site his personal Operating System, NewOS, with full source code. The OS was written from scratch and it is very modern and powerful as you can see from its feature set. It currently runs on x86 and... Sega Dreamcast but he is planning ports for Alpha, SGI and Sun Blade machines in the near future."

Comments

Re:Very nice

[Anonymous Coward]

Why a port to Sega Dreamcast? Doesn't it have its own OS already, in ROM or something?

Why port to Sega Dreamcast? Why run linux on a Sparc? Why do this? Why do that?

I'm sick and tired of questions like these. For the love of God, can't someone do something for fun? Obviously, this guy has fun doing it or he wouldn't. So why not port your personal operating system to a Dreamcast?

Heck, my pc came with its own OS already. Why did I dump it in favor of Debian? Because I like Linux and I don't like Windows. Linux is fun.

Obviously not ready for military use.

[Tim]

"Anytime I see a booyah! in source code I know it's quality."

To conform to mil-spec, that line would have to be changed to "hooah!"... :-)

Use your own OS...

[mattkime]

Isn't it funny how many developers can write their own unix-like-OS, yet a whole team of developers haven't yet fully implement the windows 32 bit libraries of top of linux?

Re:Use your own OS...

[mech9t8]

Well, the closer you get to the users, the more complex things get... never mind the feature involved. The Win32 libraries include everything from the base file system things to sound libraries to MIDI support to all the UI widgets to networking to printer support to ...

There's a lot in there. Somethings haven't really been done on built-from-scratch UNIX environments, never mind trying to emulate exactly what Microsoft did...
--
Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.

Re:Okay, this is ridiculous...

[hicktruckdriver]

Oh, open source sandwiches definitely make sense!

If there's a roach in a proprietary Microsoft BLT, you won't know about it until you've swallowed it and contracted some horrible disease. With open source sandwiches, you can send your changes back to the developer.

Of course, you could just reverse-engineer your sandwich and look to see if there's a bug in it, but that's not legal persuant to the DMCA.

darius

never call anything 'new' ....

[taniwha]

if it takes off 10 years from now you'll be sorry ....

Other OSes in development

[diablovision]

I don't find this to terribly new. There are literally hundreds of OS projects like this one, at various stages of completion. Read alt.os.development sometime, there are plenty of brilliant people toiling away on their hobby operating systems. Recently the developer (or someone pushing it) posted a link to this OS on the newsgroup, but the page was in Italian or Portugese. Needless to say, good way to frustrate a bunch of OS developers!

For some info on developing your own OS check out:

http://www.execpc.com/~geezer/os/

Is just one of the regulars (well not too regular these days) on the newsgroup. The "Triple Fault Club" is kind of funny actually. Everyone's OS has flummoxed many a frustrated x86 processor at some point! From his site I learned some of the ropes. Also check out some of the sites on the webring. Many OSes, varying from toys to useable systems.

BTW, people on the newsgroup generally sneer at any OS named ____OS or ___ix. There are so many ChrisOS, and DaveOS, and Winix and Finix and Pukenix, etc...

But of course there is MacOS and Linux...

Anytime

[rjamestaylor]

Anytime I see a booyah! in source code I know it's quality.

int main()
{

int fd;
size_t len;
char c;

printf("test\n");

printf("my thread id is %d\n", sys_get_current_thread_id());

printf("enter something: ");

for(;;) {
c = getc();
printf("%c", c);
}

for(;;) {
sys_snooze(1000000);
printf("booyah!");
}

for(;;);
return 0;
}

This was taken from main.c and is:

/*
** Copyright 2001, Travis Geiselbrecht.
** All rights reserved.

--

NewOS

[quickquack]

NewOS's name is funny. In Hindu, "New Oh Ess" or "Newoess" means "one who makes false promises."

Sort of funny. Like how CIPA (Children's Online Protection Act) means "pussy" in Swedish.
------------

No mention of "help wanted"

[proxima]

Curious, this guy makes no mention of wanting any developer help. This reminds me of the guy making AtheOS. I am absolutely amazed at the ability for one developer to whip up something so quickly - within months. The coding talent and drive to create these small OSes is incredible. Considering much smaller applications easily have dozens of developers, the idea of creating an OS from scratch with multiprocessor and multithreading support is unbelievable. Perhaps they used some code or ideas from other open source kernels, but hey, that's what open source is all about.

Even if neither of these OSes take off, I admire their drive to focus this well as a solo developer.

division

[bricriu]

*sigh* Another day, another partitiion on my hard drive.... what's that, now 5?

Okay, this is ridiculous...

[wrinkledshirt]

Many thanks goes out to the people at Perforce for making such a good revision control system, the developers at OpenBLT for giving me some ideas, and Be for giving me such a good development platform.

Okay, I'm all for Open Source and sharing of ideas and all that, but this has gone too far. For the love of God, you CAN'T open source a good sandwich!

Where does it all stop? Why? WHYYYYYY?!?!?!

(sorry)

Re:feature set.

[Dancin_Santa]

looks like "High-performance TCP/IP stack" is a planned feature

That's pretty cool. I was thinking of implementing a "packet-losing, barely functional TCP/IP stack" with the upcoming SantaOS, but I may have to change my strategy now that someone's come along and promised better...

Dancin Santa